#Quote
More Quotes by Ferdinand de Saussure
Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law.
Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations.
In fact, from then on scholars engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European languages with one another, and eventually they could not fail to wonder what exactly these connections showed, and how they should be interpreted in concrete terms.
The ultimate law of language is, dare we say, that nothing can ever reside in a single term. This is a direct consequence of the fact that linguistic signs are unrelated to what they designate and that, therefore, 'a' cannot designate anything without the the aid of 'b' and vice versa, or, in other words, that both have value only by the difference between them.
Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.
Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.
Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.
In the lives of individuals and societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain solely the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs.
Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.
It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent.
